A STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

UPDATED BELOW!

And Moses was content to dwell with the man : and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter.And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, "I have been a stranger in a strange land."
-- Exodus 2: 21-22


We recently received an email from a prominent federal defense attorney who noted his/her travails on a recent Monday morning outing to our humble building.

There was no place to park and after a half an hour of circling they parked in the median on a grass strip several blocks away.

They got to the courtroom only to be told the prosecutor they had a meeting with had decided not to show up for work that day.

A quick trip to the restroom (a clear rookie mistake) produced a few untimely steps in human liquid waste that was on the floor.

And finally, beaten down by the heat, the lines, the smelly and dirty bathrooms not to mention the ridiculous belief that the prosecutor who agreed to meet them in court had any intention of actually showing up, they trudged back to their car, tie askew, bathed in sweat, actually longing for Judge Dimeitrouleas’s rocket docket, or for a quick arraignment and trial before Judge Huck, or a nice friendly sentencing before Judge Zlock.

Query: The door swings both ways on this. State practitioners will occasionally latch onto a federal matter and walk out of court bewildered by the lack of discovery and astounded by pre-sentence reports (ghost written by federal prosecutors, for federal prosecutors, thus ensuring that federal prosecutors will not perish from this earth-or something like that) and confused by a maze of rules and statute numbers (“discovery shall not be provided until the appellate decision is final”), not to mention appellate decisions written by Bush appointees, all designed to ensure that the defendant has a speedy and fair trial, followed by a sentencing usually within a week of arrest.

Have we reached a time of specialization when practitioners of criminal law are better off staying in their own respective ponds?

See you in court, where after all this time in the REGJB, if you haven't latched on to a sympathetic judge who will let you use their bathroom, or figured out the "jury room bathroom trick", then all the knowledge in the world of case law will not save you from yourself.

UPDATE:
How many people does it take to get a man out of a tree?
The Herald has the answer
HERE

The real question is how many civil lawyers will it take to sort out the mess now?